A more agreeable theme will be the people our travellers meet. Whoever goes from another American city to New York is struck by the strange faces he sees—phizzes and figures that make Hans Breitmann commonplace and Nast a portrait painter instead of a caricaturist. Could one have suspected such oddities in human shape, such outlandish rigs? The New Yorker going to London is still more surprised at the queer-looking specimens he sees there, surpassing the fancy of Dickens and Cruikshank: plenty of Bagstocks, Peggotys and Skewtons; perfumed old beaux, with enormous gloves, too long in the fingers, and with an eyeglass held muscularly in one eye socket by screwing up the face; and all sorts of people belonging to the last century, and magically coming out of bandboxes a hundred years old.
So, at least, writes Augustus from London; and presently, as if whisked off by an enchanter, we hear of the youth in Naples, "the noisiest city in Europe," he says, where all the people chatter incessantly—"the dirtiest city, too, and one of the most delightful." There is something enviable to us desk-tethered mortals in these wide-striding rovers who one week are in Copenhagen and the next in Constantinople. "Hang it," says Brown, coming down to breakfast in Brussels and finding that Smith has gone, "I meant to bid Smith good-by, and forgot it. But I shall run across him in Smyrna next month, and can do it then."
Before we have digested the Neapolitan missive of Augustus, and its funny account of his fellow voyagers—how the men kissed all their male friends at parting, as women do with us, and, after kissing, ran again to the car windows to blow and throw last kisses—we see the traveller in Toledo, and reeling off his diary to us in some such fashion as this: "Here we find Burgos, formerly the capital of Castile and Leon, showing signs of former greatness, but now fallen to decay. It has a magnificent cathedral, a convent, and a nunnery, in which the people seem to have spent all their money, the rest of the city being mostly in ruins. Next we come to the Escurial, that vast pile, embracing palace, monastery, and cathedral, with burying place for the reigning kings. Leaving Madrid for a few moments, we will look at Toledo. Toledo is one of the old cities of Spain, and was a place of some importance when taken by the Romans, about 200 B.C. It had at one time 200,000 inhabitants; now but 17,000. What struck me so strangely was, why they should build up such a city among these rocky hills, not a tree or shrub to be seen outside the city, and very few inside," etc.
I quite like to read these travellers' letters, with their odd jumpings from city to city and century to century. True, a man might girdle the earth as many times as the Wandering Jew, without reaping a tithe of the instruction that Xavier de Maistre got from his "Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre"; and again, one untravelled, humorous pen made a small Connecticut town more talked of than any other of its size in the United States—I mean, of course, Danbury. Still, the exhilaration of travel, and its habit of observation, do lend freshness to writing. Then the returned traveller has a fund of new ideas for us stay-at-homes, and his story is agreeable provided he does not pronounce his French and German too abominably. He corrects our fancies by his experience. Who does not know Mrs. Norton's "A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers," and has not conjured up an image of "fair Bingen on the Rhine"? "Fair Bingen!" cries Miss Kate contemptuously, when we ask her memory of the place. "Why, Bingen is nothing—not handsome, not picturesque, not poetic, not even clean. In fact, it is the smelliest place on earth, except Cologne." So the traveller modifies our stay-at-home impressions.
Again, we always notice signs of mental growth and widening in our returned travellers. Besides, for a time they are less anxious over details, less overcome by trivial mishaps; they have an agreeable aplomb; they bring a certain refreshing atmosphere of leisure to our round of careful routine. One palpable danger of the traveller is becoming a slave to his guide-book, as some opera-goers are to the libretto; he is verifying the assertions of his Murray, when he should be seeing the landscape or the cathedral; he spends the time he has for picture galleries in checking off the catalogue, as if hired to certify that the alleged contents are there. Travellers who see only what the books tell them to see bring us home no facts and opinions of value.
The earth has now been so tracked from pole to equator that the traveller, to gain the world's attention, must see old things with new eyes, or must ferret out new paths and places. Still, for a Stanley and a Cameron mankind has immeasurable wonder; so has it for some tremendous exploring sportsman like Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Cumming, who takes only an ordinary paragraph to describe such an episode as the crunching to death of his gun-bearer on a certain Indian "nullah," adding: "This was a sad termination to what had been a brief but successful chasse—my bag during the trip consisting of seven tigers, a panther, and a bear."
As to types of travellers, they have nearly all been drawn—the irascible, the erratic, the English, the nil admirari, the enthusiastic, and so on. Travelling is bad for some people, like Jack Peters, who had his cards in Europe printed "Mr. Jacques Petersilli," pretending it to be easier for his European friends to get the hang of that title, of which the "silly" part was all acquired across the sea.
The ex-Reverend Christopher Cheeseman, tutor and philosopher, is a voyager of a sort perhaps destined to be more generally known among us. He visits Europe as often as he can procure his passage and pocket money in return for his valuable services as escort and adviser. He arranges the preliminaries of purchasing the tickets and outfits, but, once afloat, allows little to burden him with anxiety. Aboard ship he is recognized as a good teller of stories, some serious but not truthful, some comic but not truthful, these last being nicely graduated in delicacy from the boudoir to the mess table. Reaching England, he has prayers put up in the established church for the safe arrival of "Christopher Crozier Cheeseman and party"—the humor being that he is only the courier or nominally useful man of the persons who pay for him, and whom he lumps as "party." He studies the peerage attentively, carefully deciphering the mysteries of the coats of arms on the equipages. In England, when visiting the cathedrals, he expresses a great desire to be a monk (probably of the bon vivant sort), and actually pushes his asceticism to the point of attending religious services with great regularity; but at Rome the rogue will do as Romans do, and may be found any Sunday afternoon listening to the band on the Pincio. He likes best to travel as tutor to some ingenuous youth, because it comes handy to leave the lad to fight a duel in France, or gamble in Germany, or fall in love in Switzerland, while the judicious mentor is supplied with funds to take a little diversion on his own account, after his arduous duties. But let us stop at the threshold of this sketch, because it is plainly one for the skilled novelist, rather than the rambling, loitering prattler, to undertake.
SWINDLERS AND DUPES.